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Women Writers in Review is a collection of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century reviews, publication notices, literary histories, and
other texts responding to works by early women writers.
Women Writers in Review is published by the Women Writers
Project at Northeastern University
and was created as part of the Cultures of Reception initiative, which
fosters research into the transatlantic reception and circulation of early women’s texts.

Featured quotes

Visualizations courtesy of Steven Braun. The reviews in Cultures of Reception are tagged by their evaluations, running from “very positive” to “very negative.” These visualizations show variations in individual authors’ reception over time by representing positive evaluations with dark green circles and negative evaluations with dark red circles. Each circle represents a cluster of reception evaluations at that point in time and the size of each circle is proportional to the number of evaluations.

About Women Writers in Review

Women Writers in Review, an initiative of the
Women Writers Project, is a collection of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century reviews, publication notices, literary histories, and
other texts responding to works by early women writers.
Women Writers in Review was created as part of the
Cultures of Reception project, which was designed to investigate the discourse of reception in connection with the changing
transatlantic literary landscape from 1770 to 1830. The Cultures of Reception project was
generously funded by a Collaborative Research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Women Writers in Review collects more than 600 reviews that were encoded in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
markup language to record their structures, rhetorical features, and intertextual moves (such as quotation from other texts).
The Women Writers in Review interface offers sorting by the reviews’ sources, by the authors and works that they
reference, by their genres and formats, and by tracked tags such as the topics they discuss and their evaluations of reviewed texts.

We hope that Women Writers in Review will enable researchers to address a wide range of questions, which might include: how do periodical reviews in this
period imagine the relationship between the local and transnational writing spaces? How do
reviews work to constitute for women authors a sense of a reading public? What are the differences that mark reading and reviewing practices across
various regions and localities? To what extent does geography affect patterns of
reference to women’s writing during this period? How do reviews, anthologies, and other similar sources gender particular spaces
or locations of reading?

For an explanation of the terminology we have used to describe the information
published on this site, go here; for more on using the
interface itself, see this page.

Women Writers in Review has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Navigating Women Writers in Review

Exploring by Authors, Reviews, Tags and Sources

To begin browsing the collection, you can use the “Explore” navigation tab or the “Explore” section buttons on the home page to
select from the index pages for the authors, works, sources, and tagged content
in Women Writers in Review. (See here for a more detailed explanation of
how we define all of these terms.) From these lists, you can continue to sort and
filter your results, or click on individual works, tags, authors, and
sources to view their landing pages and select from relevant reviews. The “Explore” tab appears at the top of every page, enabling you to return to the index pages at any time.

Navigating Landing Pages

The landing pages for authors, received works, and periodical sources include basic
bibliographic and biographic details, such as: birth and death or publication dates;
publishers, editors, and publication locations; and locations of birth and death. Landing
pages for received authors also provide a list of the works which are discussed in Women Writers in Review, and
links to name authorities, such as WorldCat and
the Library of Congress Name Authority. Landing pages for received works
provide links to any editions of those works published in Women Writers Online,
(subscription required; see this page
for information on subscribing and setting up a free trial). It is worth noting that we have linked
to Women Writers Online whenever an edition of a reviewed work is published there; the edition in WWO is
not necessarily the particular edition under review.

On the landing pages, you will find a list of the individual reviews that
were written about each author or work, published in each source, or marked with each tag.
Longer sets of results will have multiple pages, which you can navigate using the numbered
boxes at the top of the listed reviews. To open any review for reading, simply click on its title. You can also use the
right-hand caret ()
to display or hide additional details about each review, or select a facet from the left-hand list to
filter the results you see on each landing page.

Filtering with Facets

The list that appears on the left under the “Filter Results” heading will allow you to
narrow the results you get in a set of reviews. For example, you can click on the “Authors”
facets from a source’s landing page to view a list of all the authors that are discussed
by that source—clicking again will minimize the list. Clicking on a facet will narrow your set of reviews to include
only those for that facet—and clicking a second time will pull up the full set of results again.

Reading Reviews

The reading pages for individual reviews display relevant tags in the buttons at the top,
which will enable you to navigate to other reviews with matching tags. Publication details and notes for each item
appear in the box on the left, with links to the landing pages for authors, received works, and sources.
If the work discussed in a particular review is available in Women Writers Online,
you will be able to navigate to the WWO edition using a button that appears after the work’s citation,
like this: .

Terminology

Because Women Writers in Review is a collection of texts that were chosen
for their responses to other texts, the layers of bibliographic information at stake
can become quite complex. To maintain consistency in our identifications of textual features, we
are defining several bibliographic terms in ways that are particular
to this project. For example, we have adopted an intentionally broad usage of review,
encompassing not only literary and theatrical reviews but also publication notices,
republished textual extracts, literary histories, and a range of documents that discuss other texts. Essentially, we use the term review
in reference to all of the varied individual texts that are published on this platform. To keep the intertextual layers
of Women Writers in Review distinct, we have also defined several terms, such as author
and work, in ways that are quite precise. Below are more details on the terms that we use to identify
textual information in Women Writers in Review.

Authors

Most reviews have no known author, so Women Writers in Review instead
uses the term “authors” as shorthand for “referenced authors”—people who
are mentioned or discussed in the reviews and who also hold some responsibility for creating texts.
As a Women Writers Project initiative, Women Writers in Review seeks to highlight women’s
contributions to creative works and so we apply the word “author” flexibly and include, for
example, people identified as translators.

Reviews, Sources, and Works

Women Writers in Review seeks to place women’s writing in its context as a
product of—and influence on—a growing literary culture in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. To that end, we have collected several types of
bibliographic information:

reviews, or the TEI-encoded transcriptions of individual texts, including data about their
sources, and pointers to any referenced works or authors;

sources, or the historical periodicals/books/etc. in which the
reviews were originally published; and

works (shorthand for “referenced works”), or the distinct textual
creations which are referenced in the reviews.

Levels of Bibliographic Data

Women Writers in Review subdivides each “work” into the following bibliographic
entities:

the work, or the text as a distinct artistic creation;

expressions, or the text as created or interpreted in
different ways; and

For example, Hannah Adams wrote A Summary History of New England,
which she later reinterpreted for a younger audience (An Abridgement
of the History of New England for the Use of Young Persons). We have
grouped these two texts as expressions of the same work
(see here). In this case, there is no need to
distinguish manifestations. An expression might have more than one manifestation if it was printed in
multiple countries, or republished with minor corrections—neither of which applies to
A Summary History of New England or An Abridgement
of the History of New England for the Use of Young Persons.

It is worth noting that Women Writers in Review should not be considered a comprehensive
resource for works’ publication histories. Editions are listed only if referenced by particular reviews.

Teaching with Women Writers in Review

Here are a few activities to introduce Women Writers in Review in the classroom. These will
provide a framework for students to begin exploring reviews and thinking about the ways they might use the collection. The activities below were developed in collaboration with
pedagogical development consultants Jason Payton of Sam Houston State University and Paschalina Minou, independent scholar.
You can find more assignments involving WWiR, and more information on our pedagogical development consultant program, here.

The activities below can be completed by small groups during class or by individual students outside of class. For all of
these activities, we recommend that you first ask students to review WWiR’sterminology and navigation pages.

Scavenger Hunt

Ask students to complete a
scavenger hunt in WWiR. Below are a few suggestions for items that students could search for in the collection:

References to either “female writers” or “female readers”

Discussions of the costs of books, solicitations of subscriptions, or other aspects of print publication and circulation

References to or reprints of other reviews

Quotations of two or more paragraphs from reviewed texts

Discussions of gender equality or the rights of women

Usage of the word “fair” (bonus points if combined with “authoress”)

Once students have completed their search, discuss their results in the class as a whole. Some questions for consideration might be:
How did students locate
their results? Were any items particularly easy or difficult to find? How representative do the examples that each student or group found found seem
to be? Were there interesting differences in the results that students found for any items on the list?

This activity provides an introduction to some prominent topics in the collection, while asking students to gain proficiency in navigating the site and encouraging
consideration of early transatlantic review culture more broadly.

Survey of Adjectives

Ask students to read through several reviews and track all of the adjectives applied
to authors and their works. You may wish to assign a group of reviews or ask students to look at different subsets of the collection—for
example, students could compare “Very positive” and “Very negative” reviews, or filter by different formats and genres, or
look at North American and British reviews.

Ask students to compile two lists: one with the adjectives applied to women writers and another with the adjectives applied to their writing (you
may also want to ask students to observe descriptions of male writers and male-authored texts that appear in the reviews). Ask students to report
their findings in a collaborative online document, through a class site, on whiteboards in the classroom, or however you prefer to share content in your class. Once the results are collected, ask students to identify the kinds
of descriptors they have found (e.g., describing age, physical appearance, genre, gender, class, literary quality). You might ask:
How do the descriptors break down into positive and negative categorizations? Are any adjectives being used to describe both the authors
and their works? Are there any differences between the subsets of reviews? What do you think these results might indicate about
the ways that women writers were represented in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals?

This activity can begin a discussion about the reception—and representation—of women writers in transatlantic periodical culture
while asking students to navigate and filter results in WWiR and encouraging them to pay
careful attention to the language of individual reviews.

Survey of Evaluative Criteria

This activity also asks students to
collect and categorize examples from WWiR, focusing on evaluative criteria more broadly. As with the survey of adjectives, this
activity can be usefully applied to subsets of the collection to enable comparison and introduce filtering by evaluation, location, theme, and so on. Ask students to look through different
sets of reviews and collect examples of the language these use to evaluate the reviewed texts. A few examples will likely be helpful here:

“These various pieces abound in beauties, while they are by no means free from inaccuracies and blemiſhes. The beauties, however, greatly preponderate, and diſcover marks of genius, ſentiment, and pathos, which give fair promiſe of future excellence. The defects in theſe ſketches are principally to be attributed to precipitancy, and an imperfect acquaintance with the rules of Engliſh versification.”

“Many of the lines being redundant, and others deficient, as may be ſeen in the above quotations, and in hundreds more that we could give, were it worth while to detain the reader longer on this abortive effort. We do not mean to ſay that the chief merit of a dramatic piece conſifts in the metre; but we do ſay there is ſuch a high indecorum in ſoliciting the notice of the public to a piece, in which the moſt common and eaſy rules of compoſition are not attended to.”

“The Engliſh blank verſe is of very eaſy conſtruction, and requires only a tolerable ear for its compoſition; but the blank verſe of this lady is a mere buſineſs of typography; the ear has nothing to do with it; to turn it into proſe you need only print it differently.”

Ask the students to collect as many examples as they can find and then begin identifying the categories of evaluative criteria being applied; for example, the three
quotes above all evaluate the works they discuss according to their fidelity to, or mastery of, some expected principles for writing verse. Other evaluative criteria might be: appropriateness of subject matter for a female author, readerly pleasure, grammatical correctness, or originality.

Once students have located quotes and categorized their evaluative criteria, ask them to share both quotes and categorizations
with the class as a whole (because these will be longer than individual adjectives, electronic sharing is recommended). Then ask the students if they want to revise their taxonomies, having seen their classmates’ results. You may want to have the group consider the existing evaluative categories in WWiR, structured
broadly around positive and negative evaluations, to lead into a discussion of how digital collections like this one can frame
readers’ engagements with their materials.

This activity can help to introduce larger questions of collection design, while asking students to think about more challenging
aspects of categorization and practice recognizing patterns in the rhetoric used in reviews of women’s writing.

These materials are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license; copyright for all materials remains with their authors.